I used to have to update these manually so did a bit of digging and found a few different tutorials that helped me slap this together. Now the year in your SMF footer copyright, the message always displays the current year.

Open index.template.php and find:

	<div id="footer_section"><div class="frame">
		<ul class="reset">
			<li class="copyright">', theme_copyright(), '</li>

Add after:

';
 		$time = time () ; 
 		$year= date("Y",$time); 
 		echo ' <li>Copyright &copy; ' . $year . ' YOUR-FORUM-NAME | All Rights Reserved</li>';

echo '

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